From ExtremeTech: Both SpaceX and Blue Origin have dabbled in space tourism, launching a handful of paying customers into space aboard their rockets. Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic has been promising a different kind of space tourism for almost 20 years, and it's finally made good. The company's VSS Unity spacecraft just carried its first crew of space tourists on Galactic 02, its second commercial launch.
Unlike the rest of the burgeoning space tourism industry, Virgin Galactic uses a rocket-powered plane instead of a rocket. Galactic 02 started like all of the company's non-commercial flights. The VSS Unity space plane was mounted to the VMS Eve carrier, which first flew in 2008.
Even carried Unity to an altitude of 44,300 feet, at which time the space plane detached and used its rocket motor to shoot upward to its maximum altitude of 55 miles (88 kilometers). That's just below the Kármán Line, an informal division between the atmosphere and space at 62 miles (100 kilometers). VSS Unity does not enter low-Earth orbit, but its long parabolic trajectory does give passengers several minutes of weightlessness. The total flight time was about one hour, after which VSS Unity safely landed at Virgin's New Mexico airstrip. Whether this counts as going to space is up for debate.
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